Professor Maryanne Dever

Biography

Maryanne Dever holds degrees from the University of Queensland (BA Hons) and the University of Sydney (MA Hons, PhD). Before coming to the University of Technology Sydney she held positions at a number of universities, including the University of Sydney, the University of Hong Kong, and Monash University where she was an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research.

Professional

She is a former President of the Australian Women's & Gender Studies Association.

In 2016 she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Tampere, Finland. In 2015 was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Tampere and Turku, Finland. In 2014 she was a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and held the inaugural Gender Institute / Humanities Research Centre Visiting Fellowship at the ANU, Canberra. She has also held fellowships and visiting posts at: the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminism at McGill University, the Institute of Women's Studies at University of Ottawa, Manning Clark House, and the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Research Interests

Maryanne's research encompasses archive studies, feminist literary and cultural history and digital humanities. Her current research projects focus on issues of intimacy and materiality in relation to both research practice (methodology) and to the socio-cultural status of archived objects.

With Linda Morra she co-convenes, the 'archivefutures' research network, an international network of scholars and archivists engaged in speculative and theoretically informed considerations of archived manuscripts and personal papers. Together they also co-edited a special issue of the journal Archives and Manuscripts on 'Literary Archives, Materiality and the Digital' published in 2014.

In 2016 Maryanne is presenting at the Gerald Aylmer Seminar, The Experience of the Archive, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, in April, and presenting a keynote at Materiality and the Visual Arts Archive: Matter and Meaning at the University of Brighton in September.

She has on-going research interests in the area of gender, work and higher education and has published widely on women's and gender studies. She co-edited (with Lisa Adkins) the volume The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency (Palgrave 2015). She has received funding from: the Australian Research Council and the Sidney Myer Fund.

Can supervise: Yes

Maryanne is an experienced graduate supervisor and has supervised more than 20 higher degree theses to completion. She would be particularly interested to work with potential research students on the following: engagements with literary archives and critical archive studies; archives and materiality; feminist inquiries, especially feminism and popular culture and feminist literary adn cultural history; key questions in gender and higher education.

Maryanne Dever has extensive programme management, curriculum development and teaching experience across literary studies, women's and gender studies, and cultural studies. She has received a series of awards and citations for her teaching, including the Dean of Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching and Curriculum Development, Monash University (2008). She held a 2011 University of Newcastle Teaching and Learning Fellowship from which she produced the report, Smart Teaching (2012).

She is currently co-teaching Honours Research Methods (55993) in the School of Communications and contributing to Becoming Australia (54098) and the Honours Seminar in Communication and Society (55995). She is responsible for developing the Faculty's new internship-like subject The Future of Work for introduction in 2017.

Dever, M. 2015, 'Papered over, or some observations on materiality and method' in Stone, A.L. & Cantrell, J. (eds), Out of the Closet and Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, SUNY Press, Albany.

The papers of radical feminist writer Monique Wittig (1935&#8211;2003) are now available for researchers to consult in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This article provides an account of the provenance of the collection, its holdings and its passage to the Beinecke. In particular, it explores what has and has not survived and highlights the timeliness of the opening of Wittig's papers in terms of current speculation around the history and archiving of feminism as a movement.

Despite a burgeoning of law schools in Australia in the last 15 years, there has been very little exploration of the expectations and aspirations of students commencing a law degree in Australia. By contrast, a number of studies on features of professional life for practising lawyers are emerging. In particular, recent studies have shown high levels of stress, anxiety and depression among practising lawyers. In addition, there is evidence of high levels of attrition of women from private legal practice in the first few years following admission and a significant under-representation of women in the senior levels of the profession. Universities and their law schools have not traditionally focused on preparing students for the realities of the legal workplace, concentrating instead on technical legal knowledge and practical legal skills. We recently set out to ask commencing (that is, newly enrolled) students in their first few weeks of study what they thought legal practice would be like, and what sort of career and lifestyle they would have. In this paper, we set out the context for the 2009 study into first-year students' career expectations and analyse some of the key findings.

This article examines recent public debate in Australia around the question of paid maternity leave with specific reference to the way this policy has been mooted as a possible key to reversing or stabilizing Australia's declining birth-rate. The paid maternity leave debate is read against a set of debates that have unfolded concurrently but generally have been treated separately: those concerning access to assisted reproductive technologies, gay marriage, border protection, and mandatory detention. What unites these debates is tension over who constitutes "proper" families, "correct" mothers and the "right" (white) babies. We are interested in the way these debates not only give expression to shared anxieties about race, (reproductive) biology and nation, but in fact depend upon one another in their efforts to re-constitute familiar hierarchies of meaning and merit in the realms of motherhood and family, which are then materialised in the current Australian federal government's policies on family, welfare, work and immigration.

Across the past two decades feminist movements world-wide have been responding to the question of cultural difference. Comfortable notions of universal sisterhood have increasingly given way to contingent alliances shaped by new understandings of difference; power, and pluralism. In extending some of the contemporary debates in cross-cultural feminism into the domain of teaching, this essay will explore how some of these debates are influencing the methods and ideals underpinning feminist pedagogy and will consider how responsive the "feminist classroom" has been to a range of cross-cultural dilemmas. As feminist pedagogic practice is inevitably informed by shifting cultural and power politics at play in individual contexts, the essay will seek to address some of the specific issues arising in different cultural contexts, including the politics of "political correctness" and multiculturalism in Australia and North America and the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism in Hong Kong. How do these issues affect the meaning(s) of feminism in the classroom? How do they redefine our understanding of "radical pedagogy"?

Dever, M. 1991, '"No time is inopportune for a protest": Aspects of the political activities of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw', Hecate: an interdisciplinary journal of women's liberation, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 9-21.

Dever, M. & Curtin, J. School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University 2004, The Politics of Reproduction: The Howard Government, Paid Maternity Leave and Family Friendly Policy, Fertility, Families and the Future Working Paper No 3, no. 3.

Dever, M. & Maher, J.M. School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University 2002, Families, Fertility and the Future: Preliminary Thoughts and Findings, Families and the Future Working Paper No 1, no. 1.